At Night, the Ice Weasels Come
Friday, May. 11, 2007 at 9:37 a.m.
If you�ve ever worked as a stage technician, you�ve probably heard this statement:
�Actors trip over a tape line. Dancers trip over a chalk line that�s been erased.�
I have lived as an actor, a dancer, and as a stage technician, and so therefore I can speak with complete authority when I say that the above statement is absolutely true. As an actor, I fell down stairs, tripped over beds, and caught my heel in my hoopskirt in such a manner that I nearly rolled off the front apron in the middle of a show. As a dancer, I was able to maintain perfect balance en pointe and yet, I tripped over the shinbreakers on the lighting trees so often I have permanent dents in my calves. And I got the extreme pleasure of snarking on the headsets to my fellow techies as I got to observe others doing the same things while waiting for the follow spot queue to hit the Rat King as he entered upstage left on our fourth production of the Nutcracker (aka Ballbuster) for the season.
So the other day, I felt very little surprise in my extreme grace when I managed to sprain my ankle as I was climbing into a weights machine. A bicep-tricep machine, to be precise. I managed to step just right (or wrong, to be more precise) on the outrigger and twisted hell out of my right ankle, prompting me to shout �Oh!� in a voice that was far too eerily like my mother�s for comfort. So I did what any other person would do: I kind of curled up into a fetal position on the machine while attempting to rotate my injured foot about to see if the damn thing was broken, after which I thought, �Hm. Must�ve just scared it� (scared it being a universal actron/dancer phrase for, �Yes, I am injured but I can go on, yes I can, I can continue with the rest of the performance, sigh�) yet after I got home and plunked into the recliner to knit after dinner (which is my usual evening spot) the Hubster and I had this conversation:
Hubster: Did you hurt yourself today?
Valkyrie: I fell out of a bicep-tricep machine today. Why?
Hubster: I�m watching your ankle swell up. Doesn�t that hurt?
Valkyrie: You know, it does, a little. Especially when I do this (rotating the injured foot) Ow.
Hubster: Um, I don�t think you should drive with that ankle like that.
Valkyrie: (gleefully) You mean I can call in sick??
Hubster: Don�t you think you should??
Valkyrie: Wow, you�re the best Hubster ever!!
And so it was with joy that I called the PABB and informed her that I injured myself and would not be able to drive, and I got to spend the entire day in the recliner, knitting and watching bad television!! Of course, today I�m back at work and the ankle is better (but still in need of some babying) and it still amazes me, a little, how much the notion of �The Show Must Go On� is imbedded in my very DNA. Why do we do this to ourselves? Is it a notion that we are so needed and so important that the world will collapse if we step back for a moment? Or is it the very fear that we are not? The worry that we are, in fact, both dispensable and slightly fragile?
Or should I just revel in the fact that I got an actual day off, as opposed to my normal pseudo-day off when I have more 10 activities and appointments crammed into a 5 activity day? I got see Maury and some �who your baby daddy� nonsense, which is one of my guilty pleasures (another one of which is expensive brand-name fabric softener � hey, I have to get some kicks where I can).
Anyhoo.
The other advantage to not going in to work yesterday was that one of the IT guys was able to really do some work on my computer to figure out how we can make the damn thing run faster even though spending $50 for some new memory is not an option. It makes me think of those PC vs. Apple commercials and wondered about an easy and cheap way to have the functionality of a PC but with the flexibility of an Apple, and this is all I came up with:
Ta!